The humanistic view of language teaching Free Essay Example

Terre11 (1982) describes ‘affective-humanistic activities’ as those that ‘explore the students’ values, ideas, opinions, goals, and feelings as well as their experiences’. Roberts (1982) speaks of ‘ the “humanistic/ psychological” or “whole-engagement” approach’, should share at least two significant assumptions: that the affective aspects of language learning are as important as the cognitive aspects. ‘

To give a brief summary to the understandings of the humanism in the language learning and teaching, this distinctive human quality may show itself in terms of one or more of at least five overlapping components: (I) Feelings, including both personal emotions and esthetic appreciation.

This aspect of humanism tends to reject whatever makes people feel bad, or whatever destroys or forbids esthetic enjoyment. (2) Social relations. This side of humanism encourages friendship and cooperation, and opposes whatever tends to reduce them.

(3) Responsibility. This aspect accepts the need for public scrutiny, criticism, and correction, and disapproves of whoever or whatever denies their importance. (4) Intellect, including knowledge, reason, and understanding.

This aspect fights against whatever interferes with the free exercise of the mind, and is suspicious of anything that cannot be tested intellectually. (5) Self-actualization, the quest for full realization of one’s own deepest true qualities. (Stemick, 1990) 2. Humanism in language testing 2.

1Views about humanism in language testing Different from the traditional notion that the teaching should put esteem on the output, the humanistic view of language teaching and learning attach more significance to the learners’ affective aspects in the language learning process. This notion should also be embodied in the language testing and evaluation.

However, the traditional testing is mostly product-oriented, whose results will base many important decisions about which learners are excellent and successful ones and which are not.

In addition, the teachers are usually the ones who set the tests and the students have no other choice but face themselves with the given items. Therefore, most tests evoke the anxiety and depress in the students that will decrease their normal performance. This conflicts with the humanism in education that rejects whatever makes people feel bad, or whatever destroys or forbids esthetic enjoyment. Therefore, as testing professionals and educators we should try to make the language testing process more humanistic and more user-friendly in order to help students build a full realization of their own deepest true qualities.

Stewick(1990) has made a contrast between traditional and humanized models of examination in education and concluded that: the traditional exams are product-oriented, criterion-referencing (and norm-referencing) achievement testing in which most examinees feel uneasy and anxious; whereas the humanized exams are process-oriented, reflecting on process, and criterion referencing testing which puts more regard on esthetic enjoyment. To sum up, theoretically and practically the humanism in language testing will have more positive impact on learners as well as on teaching than we expected.

Therefore, the study in this field is of significance that people should not neglect. In the next part, the writer will make some suggestions that will help make a traditional exam more humanistic and user-friendlier. 2. 2 Suggestions about make test more humanistic 2. 2. 1 in the stage of test construction 1) Providing choices among items Providing choices among items is not something new to most test setters, and provision of choice in the manner-“Do any THREE of the following” more often than not, encourages the test takers to choose according to their own taste and preference.

However, such a form is usually taken in the essay and short answer questions for the sake of encouraging the students to prepare themselves in selected areas of the subject contents. Nevertheless, advantages of this test method mostly lie in reducing the anxiety of examinees and hence in a more humanistic way improving their performance. From the perspective of real life experience, people prefer to have more freedom when they conduct some task. Choosing from the given alternatives instead of having to do the only given one may offer people some more freedom, although it is ” the freedom in a constrained form”.

But some is better than none. In real life, when people are supposed to use language, they usually have more than one option: that is, they may have some decisional control. For example, when people pick up a book or a piece of newspaper they will scan over the titles or chapter contents to decide which article to read or be begin with according to their personal interests. However, such decisional control or decisional freedom is traditional neglected in most language tests. Usually the examinees have no choice at all but to face with what they are given, no matter whether they have personal interests or not.

In such a sense, most language test contexts are not “authentic or real-life like”, and few of them take the testees’ affective needs into consideration. The author has conducted an experiment to apply more decisional control in the reading test and writing test, and the data analysis shows that the students’ state anxiety is alleviated considerably and most of them report ” more pleasure in attending such a test”(Li Na, 2001, postgraduate thesi paper). 2) Using humors in test items Humor as a wisdom only confined to human beings, is deemed to inhibit the anxiety in a threatening situation.

Actually, the interest in humor as an anxiety-alleviating factor can be traced back to Freud, which views humor as a basic mechanism in relieving tension and in reducing anxiety. Some research evidence suggests that humor tends to inhibit anxiety in testing situation. To illustrate the type of humorous modifications of test items employed in research, consider the following experimental test item as framed in both a conventional and a humorous format: Conventional format: Please give the proper forms of the given verbs: 1. The teacher said in the class: ” ____(stand) up! ” 2. The student ____ (stand) up when he knew the answer.

3. The boy couldn’t bear _____(stand) such a long time and cried. Humorous format: Please give the proper forms of the given verbs: A new teacher was trying to make use of her psychology courses. She started her class by saying : ” Everyone who thinks you’re stupid, _____(stand) up! ” After a few seconds little Johnny_____(stand) up. “Do you think you’re stupid, Johnny? ” The teacher asked. “No, Miss, but I hate to see you _____(stand) there all by yourself. ” Apparently, the humor injected in the language testing will help decrease the examinees’ negative emotions about test, and create a user-friendly humanistic environment.

3) Providing opportunities to comment on test Research shows that keeping negative emotions bottled up inside can cause emotional resistance and psychological stress (Pennebaker, 1995). Thus, if students could actively disclose their tension, uneasiness or even dissatisfaction in the test situation, they would feel much easier about the test. Some early researches indicated that college students experience less tension and threat in the test situation, and also do better, when given the opportunity to comment on difficult or ambiguous test items.

Thus, students who were encouraged to wrie comments about their test questions (i. e. “feel free to make any comments about the items in the space provided”), made higher scores than students with conventional answer sheets (Zeidner, 1998). Apart from this, giving the students the opportunity to write comments while being tested could offer some more clues to the teachers about the students’ different reactions to the test items so that the corresponding adaptation could be made to improve the quality of the next test. 2. 2.

2 In the stage of test administration 1) Creating user-friendly test environment The author has made attempt to find out possible causes of test anxiety in a previous research by distributing questionnaires among the college students in two different universities. The final result shows that most students consider environmental influence seems always (28. 3%) to cause higher degree of anxiety in them in the process of examination. Among the subparts of environmental influence, inappropriate acts of supervising teachers(21.9%, often), noise around the testing spot(21. 4% often)and test formats(33. 3% always) especially cause higher anxiety in examinees.

Fortunately, all of them can be improved as long as supervising teachers can pay more attention to examinees’ affective state, find a satisfactorily quiet place for testing and adapt the test format in a more favorable way. Among other researches, it is suggested (Zeider, 1998) that presenting a problem-solving task in a neutral or game-like manner might minimizing the test atmosphere.

Another way would be to tell the students that the problems they are about t attempt are difficult for most who try them and they should not worry if they also find the problems challenging or complex (Hill&Wigfield, 1984). 2) Providing soft background music Some studies on the effect of music played during testing suggest that the soothing, sedative background music may have a relaxing effect on the examinees. For example, Hembree’s (1988, cited in Zeidner, 1998) meta-analysis research suggests that the presence of unobtrusive music may benefit test performance, especially for high-test-anxious subjects.